Hi guys,
I'm a hobby gamedev learning how to make the kind of hard surface sci fi models I'd like to use in my games. As part of learning is getting feedback I'm going to be updating this thread with how I get on and would appreciate any creative criticism people had time to make.

In addition I'll try and capture some of the useful tips / workflows I've found as I go in case that's helpful to others

Ultimately everything is reduced to simple triangles by the renderer, so no, the triangles by themselves aren't an issue - your surface normals and smoothing have to be correct or otherwise, yes, you will get artifacts.

MoI typically generates excellent surface normals for its exports, provided the target application respects them; if the target app discards MoI's normals and generates its own, then again, you could end up with artifacts.

Triangles by themselves are not a bad thing. In fact some game modelers triangulate their models right before export just so they know exactly what the model will look like instead of letting the game engine or target app do the triangulation upon import.

...And typically for hard surface models, again MoI's objects are lightweight and excellent, especially for "mechanical animations", I don't think many people would try to model and export character models from MoI with character animation in mind as their output?

Hi WillBellJr
Thanks for the explanation. I learning on my own so its hard to find many things out. Particularly whats right and wrongs for particular applications. I like the concept of the games club (earlier in this thread) for people who want to get together and learn to make games.
All the best
Keith

Hi Keith, Will covered the points well, see also http://assets2.digitaltutors.com/pdf/QuadsTriangles.pdf for a nice summary. For me going into Unity the models will be triangulated so by keeping the whole baking pipeline as triangles avoids any issues with normals. As the animation isn't the deformation kind it doesn't make a difference.

My current workflow is to model in MOI, obviously :), making sure to keep separate copies of parts / models pre boolean so that I can easily alter things / reuse items.
Each part of the model I will want to be a different material, painted steel, chrome etc. I assign to a different style.

Once finished I export a low and high poly version of the model in obj format as triangles, tweaking the low poly setting to see how little geometry I can get away with and still retain shapes.
I then take the low poly into 3D coat (https://3dcoat.com/home/) and use the auto UV options to quickly generate a good enough UV in a couple of minutes maximum.
I then apply the UV's out to the model with only one material applied, this is because I only want one UV space for the whole game model.

Its then over to Substance Painter (https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-painter), I import the UV'd low poly model and then bake ID, normal and Curvature maps from the high poly model.
I can now easily apply different materials to specific areas by masking using the ID mask and generate wear effects automatically using curvature maps. The normal map from the high poly model gives me nice smooth rounding on curved surfaces. Once done I simply export out the game ready maps and apply.

Taken together I can therefore go from finished geometry to textured game asset extremely quickly with minimal effort!